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Phoenix "Nick" Knight
Phoenix "Nick" Knight was created on December 19th, 2012 by Skye. He is the Reaver of Charybdis "Dys" Kakai, as well as one of Drew's obsessions. History Phoenix was born on a Wednesday, April 13, 1983 Plagued has decided for me. Phoenix's family moved to the States from Queensland, Australia, when he was three. When Phoenix was six, he went missing on his way home from the neighbourhood park in a quiet section of Seattle. Five months later, the police brought him home to his parents. He was found wandering along a roadside clad only in what looked to be a thick, white sheet used to cover corpses in morgues. The cheerful child had vanished along with him when he had been taken. The rest of Phoenix's childhood was subdued. He no longer talked much, he had difficulty concentrating in school and constantly got into trouble for not paying attention, and he developed a sudden fear of water. Night terrors featuring strange, shadowy men had him screaming at four in the morning. The family was never the same again either. Phoenix's father constantly blamed himself for not going to walk Phoenix home from the park that fateful day like he'd been supposed to. Phoenix's mother wondered what horrors had befallen her little boy, though a physical exam didn't bring up anything alarming. He had not been sexually abused, he hadn't even been beaten. The trauma had been psychological. And then, when Phoenix was ten, his father hung himself. Phoenix came into his parents' bedroom one night and discovered him hanging from the fan. He'd left a note, but Phoenix never got to see it. His mother burned it on the gas stove. That week, Phoenix experienced his first hallucination. It was his father, standing over his bed. And for a second, Phoenix thought the events of that day were a bad dream. And then he realized his father had no eye sockets and was holding one of the blades of the fan that hung in his room. Phoenix didn't remember the rest of what happened, because his mother came in when he began screaming. She walked right through his father and the ghost vanished. For the next five years, Phoenix dreamed or hallucinated variations of this kind. Always, his father would be seconds from killing him, and unless he ran, he had the awful conviction the dream would turn real. Sometimes this nightmare would manifest subtly, and the transition between reality and imagination would vanish, merging one seamlessly into the next. Sometimes his mother would come in, holding a kitchen knife she'd just been using, and she'd join his father in his endless pursuit for blood. At the age of eleven, this kind of thing was seared deep into his memory. He grew up distanced even more from his mother, paranoid that one day his delusional dreams would come true. The few times he tried to tell her, she said he was reacting to his father's death. "It'll pass," she said, and then went up to her room and locked the door. Phoenix blamed himself for his old man's death–because what else were these visions trying to tell him? As the years went on, and he grew more and more isolated from his surroundings, withdrawing into a shell in a corner of his own mind as he tried to frantically grasp onto a world he no longer understood, he plunged from loneliness into depression so severe, he started to feel chronic pain in his shoulders and neck. His mother withdrew into herself, and the last fragile comfort he'd had was suddenly gone. At thirteen, he was misdiagnosed with ADHD. At sixteen, he learned his father had been bipolar and that it might be genetic. At nineteen, he was suspended from college for brutally assaulting another boy. Days after the incident, he couldn't remember why on earth he'd seen fit to do something so drastic. He also found he had trouble concentrating on the part-time job he'd picked up, and was fired after he threw a knife at a customer he'd gotten into a heated argument with. He didn't know it then, but both incidents had occurred when he'd been swinging dangerously into mania. The slightest thing could set him off. Right after that, however, he'd feel ridiculously happy about things, so it was easy to stem the regret. He knew he'd done the right thing. He didn't deserve the backlash. Once or twice a year, he’d suffer a visit from another hallucination. Lately, they all featured strange shadowy men that he felt he knew, but couldn’t place. They instilled a sharp thrill of terror into him, whoever they were. Phoenix re-enrolled into college again, even began making friends. He was a charmer, and girls found his quiet mannerisms appealing. It was easy to forget he'd ever been so angry he'd aimed to kill someone just for annoying him. Life was going okay. Good even. He was falling for a girl. Sure there were moments of depression, but he was taking antidepressants when he should. The nightmares changed at this point. Now they all featured water. That was okay, because they were only nightmares. No more hallucinating occurred now. It took several more years of alternating episodes of depression and hypomania before his mother finally started to notice and begged him to get re-diagnosed. Unfortunately, around this time, Phoenix and the girl he was dating broke up. She'd dumped him for someone else and that hurt. Man, that hurt. He didn't know how to feel. Though his heart seemed to be sinking, he felt ridiculously energized, like he wanted to go beat up something, preferably that guy she was seeing. And he knew he could. He looked wiry but he knew how to hold his own. So he did. He went a little far and paralyzed the guy–it was entirely by accident! He hadn’t meant to pick up a baseball bat when he went to corner the guy at his dorm room. He didn’t really remember much of what happened because it was such a blur of emotion. All he remembered was feeling an intense, burning passion to do…something. Nevertheless, when he came to his senses, he realized that somehow, he’d ended up paralyzing the guy. He’d beaten in his spine. Why he’d gone so far, he couldn’t recall. Whatever, the guy could heal, right? Turned out he didn’t. He died in the hospital a week later. The only reason Phoenix got away was because he’d taken the weapon with him and disposed of it. He was also, for all accounts and purposes, seemingly not the type of guy who would do such a horrible thing, and he got a friend to give him an alibi. But after the incident, his mother knew different. She called an ambulance to his place and asked them to forcibly take him to be tested once again. She knew he’d put up a fight and he didn’t disappoint her, managing to severely injure one of the male nurses in the whole debacle. This time, he was diagnosed as bipolar - but because of the curious nature of his bipolarity, he was categorized under Bipolar NOS (not otherwise specified). In other words, the psychiatrist couldn't figure out entirely why his mood cycled around between mania, hypomania and depression. He also began, for the first time, to take regular doses of lithium to keep his mania calmed down. And it helped a great deal. And then, for no other reason than because he disliked taking meds, he skipped the lithium. He was feeling fine. He was confident in his ability to keep his temper in check. He hadn’t even yelled at anyone in a month. It was all good. But then his ex came back into his life. She was furious at him (for good reason) and unaware of his real situation. She didn’t know it took him a heroic amount of effort to not take hold of her neck and snap it sideways when she came over and began to argue with him about how he’d ruined her life and other shit he suddenly did not care about. He just fucking wanted her to get out of his sight before he lost control. He couldn’t defend himself. He had nothing to counter her harsh words with. This girl, as he saw it, had ruined his life. He had weekly check-ins with his probation officer, he was forced to sit through therapy and asked again and again by too many people if he’d taken his meds and oh, he hadn’t? Well he should go take them immediately. All her fault. What had he seen in her? That guy, whoever he’d been, didn’t deserve to die. She fucking did. And so he retorted the way he’d been trying not to, rearing from irritation to anger to full-blown fury. He lashed out, not at her but at the wooden cabinets behind her. The wood snapped and so did the last of his restraint. She screamed and tried to run, but Phoenix was faster. One hand grabbed and cracked off a wedge of wood, the other found her neck, and he drove the sharp makeshift stake right through her throat. No hesitation, no guilt, definitely no regrets. He felt relieved in the instant after her scream stopped. And then the horror set in, along with the confusing mixture of guilt and fear of repercussions. They would lock him away this time. He was done for. For once, his anger didn’t blind him. Phoenix was arrested on charges of voluntary manslaughter. He decided to follow his lawyer’s advice and pled insanity. In his case, he wasn’t exactly lying. He just didn’t know the extent of how true that was yet. He thought he’d momentarily lost his temper–something that could happen to anyone. It was nothing alarming. After being interrogated and answering quite honestly he had lost control and that it had been a crime of passion rather than intent, he was sent to be diagnosed by forensic mental health professionals. They testified in his hearing that Phoenix was definitely capable of having no control when he’d committed the crime. He won his case. There was undeniable proof in his test results that he was unstable. Therefore, he did not receive the regulation ten years prison sentence, but instead, was sent to be institutionalized until he was seen fit to be released. He was sent to a local institution for the mentally ill. A jail for the crazies, in his view. Everyone here was a psycho. Every night, as he lay awake and listened to the screams of a man next door (who was convinced he was being set on fire), Phoenix wondered if one of them would break loose and murder him in his sleep. Though he was now a full-fledged adult, Phoenix wanted nothing more than to go back to his mother’s house at this point. Why was he here? He was nothing like these people! The nightmares started anew, rearing their heads after a long spell away. Now he dreamed of walls that encased him in between sheets of ice. Water rose beneath his feet and every night in his dreams, Phoenix drowned. A few months after he was committed, he saw a man fall in a hallway as he was walking to group therapy and no nurse nearby. Phoenix froze, confused, and then walked hesitantly toward him. The man got up, taking Phoenix’ hand in cold fingers tinged with the blue of death. Suddenly Phoenix recognized him. This man had been his neighbour. He’d been gone for a few weeks. Because he’d died of a lethal overdose. For some reason, his corpse didn’t seem to have gotten the memo. He started chatting like it was any other day. What was for dinner? Had he used up his outdoor trips yet? Was he heading to group therapy? Oh, how was that? This sort of thing became strangely, frighteningly normal as the years went by. He was still suffering nightmares and the occasional terrifying moment where he’d see one of the shadowy men from his childhood turning a corner ahead of him. But over the course of the six or seven years he was institutionalized, he encountered several of his old colleagues. No one else saw them. They talked to him and would even remember past conversations they’d had and bring them up. He didn’t know if he was losing his mind or suddenly turning into a necromancer. Was that even a real thing? And then one day, as he sat watching TV in the lounge, he saw the odd news reports. This was even stranger than the shit that had been happening to him, so he paid attention. He didn’t entirely believe it. But then evacuation began. Apparently there was a safe house or something below ground where people would be taken. It would have all gone fine and Phoenix would’ve ended up in Safe Haven, had the plague not spread as fast as it did. When the dead began flooding into Seattle, the doctors and nurses decided it was every man for himself. Phoenix watched the evacuation buses shut their doors on the line-ups of patients, watched the reality start to dawn on his colleagues’ faces as they saw their escape route take off down the road and heard the hungry moans of thousands of undead headed their way. Many of these people couldn’t cope. They had no grasp of reality, of the danger they were in, no idea where to go or how to react. Phoenix was luckier than most. There was no mental instability stopping him from turning and running. He ignored the cries of people he’d known as they died under the wave of Lessers. He left them all behind, hurtling over fences and climbing walls on a maniacal drive to get away. Everywhere he went, he saw death. He ran past a woman being torn into by her children, an old man who tried to bite him, the screams of a busload to trapped kindergartners. Phoenix didn’t care. He was running straight into a hypomanic state, his energy levels shooting high, adrenaline eliminating restrictions on stamina. He was more energized than he’d been in seven years. He was out of the nuthouse. He wasn’t even supervised. As this thought dawned, his sprint slowed to a happy jog. Despite the bizarre grimness of his surroundings, he smiled. He paused beside someone’s garden shed and found an axe that he thought would be useful. Phoenix did strangely well in the next three years. He travelled from state to state, never staying long. His hypomania made him far more energetic and capable of going without sleep for days in a row, so he could keep moving from safe house to safe house. It also sharpened his mind, kicking it into overdrive and increasing his reaction time, and that saved his life several times. Every good thing has its downsides, though, and Phoenix had been without lithium for a very long time. His nightmares were as horrible as they’d ever been, his hallucinations more frequent, and he would fall into an “episode” (an extended period of either mania or depression that lasts longer than a week) at least thrice every six or seven months. He learned to prepare in advance, hiding away with supplies when he felt severely lethargic and weak, but he knew he wouldn’t last much longer. When he was depressive, he couldn’t cope with the harsh new world well. His mind was a mess, swirling into hazy thoughts and guilt and fear and regret, and he couldn’t think fast enough to survive. It was hard trying to find food when, for nearly a decade, he’d had his meals made by others. He coped by forcing himself to eat anything that wouldn’t poison him, including insects. As if the survivalist experience wasn’t traumatizing, along with the constant paranoia about being jumped by Lessers or whatever else his mind found to obsess over, he was starting to see strange hallucinations again. Now they all featured cliffs. Sometimes the ground would seem to open up under his feet as he walked. He’d feel like he was falling, and would come to seconds from being pounced by a corpse. For the bigger part of three years, he rarely had a manic episode. He had little reason to get angry. Mostly he was in a depressive state, feeling sorry for himself, afraid of death or just extremely energized. There weren’t many triggers to set him off. Until he encountered a rogue group that got on his bad side. It was sometime during Year 2 of Hell on Earth. They figured he was easy pickings. He’d found some canned goods that seemed promisingly unspoilt. He did not wish to part with them. A fight ensued. He had no weapons save for his axe. He’d gotten very good with wielding it, but he was no match for four starving men. They hemmed him in and beat him until the world began to go black before his eyes. As the familiar anxiety and stress began to pound in his temples and the rogues circled him for round two, cutting off his escape, Phoenix mentally stepped back and let his anger drive him. It exploded, a hurricane pent up from the months of stress and anxiety. It overwhelmed his conscience, made driving the axe into the head of an assailant as easy as cutting into cheese. As easy as killing his ex-girlfriend. That bitch. The thought of her made him angrier. As angry as he was, however, he was still one against four, and even though he managed to slice another of the men’s necks quite deep in his feral rage, he was still losing. In the middle of this chaos, he realized that swinging that axe into human flesh felt real good. Much better than swinging at Lessers, in fact. It was such a de-stresser. He got out of that situation unscathed (the remaining rogues changed their minds when he ran at them screaming his head off), but it changed him. He was less defensive now, more offensive. He would turn his sights on humans as well as on Lessers. Everyone out there had something worth taking. Something he could use. He needed every advantage. So what if God had fucked up his mind? Clearly the devil had a lot more influence on earth, and so Phoenix catered to the devil within himself. The darkest part of his manic side, the side his mother feared so much she’d stopped visiting in the nuthouse. From prey, he went to predator. He would lurk along roads and attack survivors who looked like they wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. It was a satisfying clean-up, really. When he grew bolder, he went on to people with guns, deciding ammo would be useful. Soon, things changed. It wasn’t even because they had something he wanted. He just wanted to let out his ever-building frustration and the Lessers weren’t satisfying him. They didn’t make the strange people in his head go away. Humans did. But then he felt somewhat guilty for just a little bit. The relief of having his head cleared of ghosts was so good, though, that he didn’t stop. It was like the seal that had been around his anger had been snapped completely, and he would swing wildly from periods of blind predatory rage to bleak moments of wondering why he even bothered to live on. He was never going to be free of his illness, no matter how many heads he decapitated. The catharsis in his head just grew worse, in fact, with every life he took. Sometimes those people would show up in a hallucination, and pester him. At several points, he was close to ending the drawn-out torture of living in a world like this, close to just drowning himself in the river he so hated and feared. And then Satan decided to give him a reason to live. Phoenix heard the voice differently than he heard other voices. This wasn’t a hallucination. There was no one that he could see. Just a disembodied voice talking in his ear. Offering him a relief from his vulnerability. Satan didn’t choose him because Phoenix was unnecessarily vicious. He didn’t attack every human he met. Just ones that rubbed him the wrong way or happened to be around when he was feeling crabby. Satan chose him because Phoenix had the ability to suspend his moral conscience and do whatever it took to feel momentarily stable. He was a heat-seeking missile awaiting his next target. He’d given up all habits of restraining himself. He had no direction and, unsupervised, he was wasting away. Phoenix accepted Satan’s offer, and with it, accepted the ability of Phantasm, the promised outlet for his hallucinations. Satan also promised him a guide. Phoenix didn’t think he needed one, but was told that she would be his reason to exist. He wanted a purpose, he had one. Even if it didn’t thrill him. He didn’t know it then, but Phantasm turned out to be the worst thing he could’ve asked for. The ability to relive every horrible nightmare and hallucination in 3D did wonders for his unhinged mind. His search for the “guide” Satan promised brought him to Fort York, where he finally found her in Charybdis "Dys" Kakai. Personality Phoenix's emotional spectrum is rather like a pendulum, swinging between two extremes: manic and depressive. Somewhere in the middle is the real Phoenix, but glimpses of that person have become rare as the years without medication take their toll on his mind. During these rare times, the real Phoenix is a pretty laid-back guy. In general, he will be that quiet brooder who occasionally jumps in with something useful or witty to say. Phoenix at his core is a thinker. He likes to mull over things for hours on end, reaching stranger and stranger conclusions. He especially likes to muse over the psyche of the human mind, seeing as his own is so completely messed up beyond his own control. He has always been a bit sensitive and can get irritated quickly over certain things, but he knows when to laugh. He can even be somewhat cheeky and charming if he so chooses. But all of this becomes absolutely meaningless once Phoenix's illness starts rearing its ugly head. Phoenix is bipolar. When his mood swings into the depressive end of the pendulum, he will go dangerously quiet. His head will be spiralling into an endless catharsis of ugly thoughts about his own failures and inabilities, past mistakes, regret and increasing anxiety for the hopeless future. At this point, Phoenix is a mere shade of himself, a willing puppet to anyone who has a hold over him. If he doesn't manage to get the depression in control, it may go to a full-blown major depressive state, and he is prone to hallucinations and paranoia. His vivid dreams may oftentimes be seen through his ability of Minor Phantasm. When this depressive state goes beyond a few hours and turns long-term, Phoenix may become desperate to escape himself and reach thoughts about suicide. His reasoning is that he hasn't got anything to live for, so why put up with the crappy hand life's dealt him. If there was a God out there, Phoenix reasons, He clearly didn't give two fucks about him. Closer to the other, manic, end of the spectrum lies a state called Hypomania. When he isn't feeling down, Phoenix may be especially cheerful when he is in this elevated mood. A good symptom of this is when he starts talking more often, uncharacteristic from his usual self. He will feel a great need to express his opinion on things and may get irritatingly chipper and absent-minded, lacking his usual sharp focus. Life suddenly looks brighter and he reflects that he should take advantage of this state and live to the fullest. Here the real Phoenix shines through, albeit somewhat magnified. A little beyond hypomania comes the worst stage, mania. When Phoenix gets manic, usually because something has rubbed his sensitive ass the wrong way, the irritation goes to full-blown anger and violence follows. He will lash out at whoever is nearest, clear thinking will go out the window and he may suddenly be subject to delusions of I'm Right And Everyone Else is A Bitch. At this state, he cannot be reasoned with, and his anger morphs to vivid hallucinations of all the times he felt wronged. He may even become mentally detached from the world around him, seeing it like a movie that goes on around him. He therefore feels invulnerable, and may take unnecessary risks, forgetting that he can still die even if he is no longer human. When paranoia led by insecurity about his position kicks in, he becomes, in short, a brute. The only thing that will ring in his head is that a problem must be eliminated, and he is the only person who knows how to fix it. At times, he will refrain from violence and become unnecessarily cruel in other ways. His Phantasm may spzz both during his depressive state and manic episode, and his inner hallucinations will manifest for his victim, either at his will or because he can't help it. The more upset or agitated he is, the darker and out of control they will be. Empathy users hold a certain advantage over Phoenix, as they can keep him calm or channel out his rage. Category:Characters Category:Reavers Category:Males Category:Active